Chapter 3: So Classy

  Liam had no idea where he was going. He did not even look behind to see if he was being pursued. He just ran, until he could run no longer.

  He stopped at a small children’s playground. The playground consisted of one slide a couple of swings and some climbing frames that had seen better days.

  It was maybe a sad-looking playground but there were no rats.

  He heard the faint barking of dogs, but other than that - no animals. He sat on a swing to rest. He occasionally saw human looking figures slinking down distant avenues but they were few. He assumed most would be either at work, which meant food for the rats, the children would be at school and the rest would be hidden away at home.

  With the electronic problem, communications would be difficult. It would take some time for the police or army to come and clear up this mess. Of course, that was assuming that this system had not caused other larger problems.

  He had seen apocalyptic films where planes crashed from the skies and missile silos decided to self explode. If all of that was happening, then they had bigger problems than rats.

  Liam did not like the sound of any of them. He suspected that the different classes would also have their own perks that were not mentioned in the description. He also suspected that there must be some downside from choosing a rare class such as slower leveling.

  Still he immediately ruled out the rodent beater and job hunter classes. While they may evolve into something better down the line they were too limited for his comfort. He then ruled out option 1 because it sounded stupid. That just left options 3, 5 and 6; two rare classes and one uncommon. He was leaning towards option 6 as it seemed to offer a good chance of survival.

  Liam jumped and instinctively plumped for option 5. It was all David Bowie’s fault!

  Liam felt a surge of fire coursing through his veins. Every nerve lit up and he blacked out from the pain.

  ###

  He woke to find himself lying on the floor under the swing with his head resting in a pool of vomit.

  His head hurt badly and it was all he could do to pull himself away from the sick.

  A flashing icon caught his attention. It was like the cursor, but instead was in the shape of a man. He focused on it and a blue screen appeared.

  To the right of this, there were tabs for skills, spells and special techniques.

  Liam’s brain did a backflip. Classes, stats, experience... this was just like an RPG. He had played a few online and dabbled once or twice with tabletops, but this was a different beast altogether. This was real. He doubted there would be any respawn if he died. And, to put the cherry on the cake, they had bypassed the tutorial.

  He would have bet good money that the paranoid governments had ignored communications from this system thing, labelled them as a ploy from some foreign government, or just been too slow to react. He put his own government somewhere between the last two.

  He focused on the class. He had no idea what it entailed, so he mentally tried to select it. To his surprise, a message appeared.

  Liam smiled. Maybe this had been the best class for him after all. It certainly sounded like the skill-set would provide many benefits.

  He then mentally tried to select the skills option.

  Another table came up in front of him.

  There was not much there. But he was still new.

  He next looked at the spells page.

  *Spell awarded for achievement.

  He had a spell. He wasn’t sure what difference it would make that it was a class spell but he was eager to try it out.

  But how to cast a spell? He tried to mentally select the spell, but nothing happened. He then tried saying the spell out loud. Again nothing.

  After a few pained minutes of thought he tried again to select the spell. This time he kept a firm intent on activating the spell and envisioning the result. After all diamond claws could only mean ne thing. After a few seconds of this a surge of energy seemed to leave his body and he felt like his fingernails had been set on fire- no not just his fingers but his toes too.

  He opened his eyes and looked at his hands. Instead of the pinkish white nails, he now had sparkly claws - well more like long nails than claws. Each nail tapered to a point. He tried to scrape the swing he sat on with one nail and found it easily carved into the plastic seat. He let go of the spell and the nails just vanished. The pain did as well.

  He inhaled and exhaled deeply a few times. He had not expected the experience to be painful.

  He had a quick look at his stats page and saw that he had used 24 mana points. Estimating that he had used the spell for about nine seconds, he calculated that either there was a base mana cost of 24 mana for casting the spell or that the spell cost 2MP per second. Logically, he felt that there would be a mixture of a base cost and a maintenance cost - so something like 6MP for activating the spell and 2MP per second to maintain it. With a total of 70MP he could run the spell for over thirty seconds.

  There was some sort of transformation element to the spell. It had not just covered his nails in a coating - it had changed them to what looked like diamond. Maybe, he thought, that was what the A stood for- alteration.

  His favorite computer game had spell categories like Alteration, Conjuration and Restoration. It seemed like his class leaned more towards the alteration side. If it was anything like the game he would have to practice the spell to upgrade it and make it something formidable.

  He clicked on the last tab - Special techniques.

  There was only one technique. He assumed that it came with the class. Again, there was no description of what it did. Given the description, he did not think it was something he should try right now.

  He had become distracted by all of these details. He had to make a decision.